


and the others remained nameless

by rillrill



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-11
Updated: 2012-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 11:02:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/380679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the GoF Ficathon, prompt: "One year, instead of fighting, the tributes all band as friends and work together to fight anything the Capitol throws in the arena." Exactly what it says on the tin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the others remained nameless

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short little pre-canon thing that addresses some of the questions/headscratchers that came up when I first read the books – for example, if the tributes all pretty much know that they’re going to die, why hasn’t anyone (that we’re made aware of, at least) just commit suicide straight away? Why haven’t any previous tributes formed an alliance not against the other contestants, but against the Capitol, wherein they refuse to fight? But then, it’s very likely that this has happened and the general populace has not been made aware of it: after all, if Katniss and Peeta threatening to eat a couple berries could throw an entire country into war, what would 24 kids straight-up refusing to participate cause?

“We’re not going to live, you know.”

He looks at her with a twisted sort of acceptance in his eyes. “No shit,” he laughs, bitter, the curse reluctant to leave his mouth even despite his resignation. He is young. Fourteen at most. Looks so much younger.

She is eighteen. She comes from District 3 and she truly thought she would never be reaped. As an only child from a not-so-poor family, she never had to take tesserae. Her scores in school were excellent; her teachers recommended her to the engineers and held up her math exams as proof. She was just weeks shy of nineteen when her name was called.

“I know,” she says, emboldened but still speaking quietly. There are cameras everywhere; she knows she is going to die one way or another – either in the Arena or at the hands of the Capitol. If they make her an Avox rather than sending her into the games, who cares? She is dead, any way she frames it. “But what if we didn’t fight?”

“Then the others just kill us faster. You’ve seen those kids from 1 and 2. They’d gut us.”

“What if no one fought?”

 

It spreads through the training center like wildfire. “What if no one fought?” she whispers in the ear of a girl from 4 as the two bend down to pick up the arrows they’ve knocked into the floor. “What if we didn’t fight each other?” the girl from 4 says to the boy from 7 as they wait for their food during lunch break. “What if we just didn’t participate?” says the boy from 7 to the girl from 11 as they tie knots and set snares.

Strictly speaking, it is never specifically stated as a plan. It is a question, posed hypothetically and passed from person to person.

Less-strictly speaking, it is the best kind of plan: one on which everyone agrees.

(Not without convincing, of course. “That’s bullshit,” says the boy from 2, and the girl from 1 agrees, but the girl from 4 raises a solid point: “You only have a one-in-twenty-four chance of surviving. No matter how much you’ve trained – and don’t act like you don’t know what I’m saying, Felix, all of us here have – the odds aren’t going to be good for you. They’re not meant to be. This is supposed to be a way to punish the entire country, not a chance for twenty-odd kids to play dress-up and be on TV. They’re punishing our parents by making us murder each other. Why should we play their game? We’re all going to die. We shouldn’t hasten the process by killing each other, because that’s just what they want to see.”

“You have a point,” he says after a long pause.)

 

She is the oldest tribute that year, even older than the oldest Career by a few weeks. When Caesar interviews her, she lets on nothing of the plan.

“What are your skills?” he asks, “what makes you sure that you’ll have a fighting chance in the Arena?” She tells him that she’s very smart; that she was headed to engineering training after she finished school; that back home in her district, people come up to her parents in the streets and congratulate them on her academic prowess. The last part isn’t quite true, but she sees no harm in deception. “It seems like you’ll be a force to be reckoned with,” Caesar simpers, and she smiles back and plucks at the stupid silver dress they’ve put her in, all humility and self-deprecation, the angle her mentors decided on when they observed that she wasn’t a candidate for sexy or girlishly charming.

He announces her name again and takes her by the hand as she fumbles to her feet, and she smiles again, for real this time, drunk on power and excitement and the knowledge that she is about to raise both middle fingers to the people sitting before her, fervently applauding twenty-four sacrificial lambs, in the most obscene gesture the Capitol has ever seen.

 

The countdown ends. The gong sounds. And unlike in previous years, there is no rush to the bloodbath.

Twenty-four sacrificial lambs stand silent and tall on their pedestals, staring at the sky. 

Off her nod, they slowly step down and walk to the Cornucopia. They join hands and she speaks.

“President Snow,” she says, her voice wavering as she speaks his name, but growing stronger as she goes on. “We recognize that you have brought us here to participate in a pageant which serves as discipline and warning to the entire nation. However, we refuse to murder one another as punishment for crimes we did not commit. Therefore, on behalf of the tributes of the Forty-Second Hunger Games, we declare a cease-fire. You have a choice. You can have twenty-four victors, or you can have none at all.”

She swallows. “Thank you,” she concludes weakly.

They remain in a circle, facing each other nervously, drinking in the vast silence of the arena. Finally, a small voice breaks through the crowd. It’s the boy from 12, a tiny thing with a thatch of black hair who looks as if he’s never seen a full dinner plate in his life. “What do we do now?” he asks, twisting the sleeves of his jacket in his hands, and she swallows again, suddenly more nervous than during the countdown.

“We wait.”

 

They don’t wait long. The attacks start almost immediately, and their herd thins accordingly: the girl from 8 to a pack of wolflike mutts who rip her limb from limb; the boy from 6 to a land mine that suddenly explodes as he crosses the clearing. 

They protect themselves and each other from the Gamemakers’ tricks and threats. They do not fight each other.

“There’s at least enough food here to get us through a solid week,” appraises the girl from 8. “After that, we’ll probably have to hunt.”

“I can hunt,” volunteers boy 2 confidently, and girl 1 nods in agreement. “So can I,” she says, “I’m good with a bow and really good with knives.”

“I’m good with edible plants,” ventures the boy from 11 tentatively. “I scored well on the tests during training, at least, and I have a good memory.”

As she watches these proceedings, from where she’s kneeling over a pile of weapons, divvying them up into categories and classes, the girl from 3 smiles a proud – but not too proud – smile. It seemed improbable, she thought, but improbability is not impossibility.

She still doesn’t want to die, but more so than this, she does not want to kill.

 

Boy 11 brings back piles of edible plants and makes another, smaller, pile of poisonous ones. “Just in case,” he says, letting the thought go unfinished.

 

They take turns sleeping and hunting. The Careers turn out to be surprisingly helpful to their cause – after all, they study wilderness and survival at their academies, not just combat technique – but the others have skills worth utilizing as well. Girl 7 can create a reliable shelter from a few branches; Boy 9’s mother is a healer who has taught him just which plants will leach the poison from a bite or sting and how to dress a wound to reduce infection. 

They receive no gifts or any other communication from their mentors. The girl from 3 thinks there is good reason behind this, and she says so to Boy 5. “The Capitol must be interfering,” she says. “There’s no way people aren’t reacting to this. They must be losing their minds out there.”

“That is, if they’re even seeing it,” he grumbles. And she agrees.

 

Her mind flits, now and then, to her parents in 3. What are they seeing? What could they be thinking? She knows she’s survived longer than anyone who knew her then presumed, and she knows this because when she was reaped, they said as much. “She’ll be dead in the first twenty minutes,” snapped her mother to her father when they thought she was out of earshot, and her stomach had sunk. But she has survived this long.

Her initial plan had been to jump off her pedestal before the countdown finished and let the land mines do the job, quick and painless. One second and it’s over – quicker than being hit by a train, the preferred method of suicide in 3, and what a way to stick it to the people in charge. From the start, she was obsessed with the idea of outwitting the Gamemakers and the President and everyone who resigned her to this fate. But then it occurred to her: what if _everyone_ jumped during the countdown? What if all twenty-four of them blew themselves up and there were no Games this year? She mulled over it all throughout the train ride and parade prep before the answer occurred to her twofold: one, it would be impossible to engineer (even if half the tributes participated, another twelve would inevitably renege on the deal, hoping that everyone but them would die and they’d be declared winner by default), and two, even if it worked, the Capitol would indubitably find some way to punish their families, their districts, and everyone else they could possibly blame.

But this is different. They don’t have to fight each other. She can’t sleep too comfortably at night – after all, there are still trained killers in their midst, kids who have been brainwashed to believe that to win the Hunger Games is the greatest honor one can achieve, and there's no guaranteeing they aren't just playing along until there are few enough left to take out with a few of the stockpiled weapons – but, she thinks to herself, they are victims too. It is not wise to get caught up in blaming one’s fellow victims when one can instead fight against the people who made them that way.

“It’s too bad this happened,” Boy 5 says to her. “You could have been a revolutionary. The way you think – it’s not the way they want us to think.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “But I probably wouldn’t have been. I’m only doing this because it seems preferable to dying in the traditional way.”

 

There is an earthquake in the middle of the night. There are fires and there is a sudden blizzard. They build fires of their own, only to have them extinguished by sudden rainstorms. Mutts swarm their encampment.

Three weeks pass. They mark off each passing day with rabbit blood on the inside of the Cornucopia.

 

During the third week, three of them are bitten by a spider mutt whose venom, they all learn, results in complete loss of mental function and sudden, blind, murderous rage.

The others confine them together; let them hack each other up until the three are collapsed in a single, bloody heap. Boy 2, girl 4, boy 7. It is the only reasonable measure; there is no way to save them. The most they can do is keep the others safe.

“This is what they do,” the girl from 3 says into a nearby camera as she stands before three lifeless bodies. “This is what the Capitol does to your children. When we won’t kill each other, they do it for us. This is not entertainment. _Wake up._ ”

She stares straight ahead, her black eyes gone even darker. “Their names were Felix, Havilah, and Rowan. Do not let them die in vain.”

 

On the twenty-fourth day, the nation’s TV screens flicker, then fade to black.

Seconds later, the Gamemakers blow up the arena.

There is no winner this year, and the Districts pay for this in kind. 

 

The 42nd Hunger Games are the only games to never be shown in reruns. You can imagine why.

 

Her name is destined to be forgotten by the generations who come after her. The history books do not mention her. Future revolutionaries will have no record of the girl who refused to play the games.

Her name was Ara.


End file.
